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# 2025-03-11 - Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
A friend recommended this book, and i checked it out from the local
library. During the time period this book is set in, i was
enthusiastic about startup culture and startups. I deeply enjoyed
this author's writing style. She calls herself a millennial but
conveys a healthy dose of generation X skepticism. I can relate to
her sense of being in the middle of things and yet still feeling like
an outsider.
What follows are excerpts and spoilers that i found interesting.
# Chapter 1
Depending on whom you ask, it was either the apex, the inflection
point, or the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley's startup
scene--what cynics call a bubble, optimists called the future, and my
future coworkers, high on the fumes of a world-historical potential,
breathlessly called the ecosystem. A social network everyone said
they hated but no one could stop logging in to went public at a
valuation of one-hundred off billion dollars, it's grinning founder
ringing the opening bell over video chat, a death knell for
affordable rent in San Francisco.
It was a year of new optimism: the optimism of no hurdles, no limits,
no bad ideas. The optimism of capital, power, and opportunity.
It was the dawn of the era of the unicorns: startups valued by their
investors, at over a billion dollars.
My freelance work, proofreading and copyediting manuscripts for a
small press, was also waning in volume, because I had recently broken
up with the editor who assigned it to me. The relationship had been
stressful, but reliably consuming: the editor, several years my
senior, had talked about marriage but wouldn't stop cheating. These
infidelities were revealed after he borrowed my laptop for a weekend
and returned it without logging out of his accounts, where I read a
series of romantic and brooding private messages he exchanged with a
voluptuous folk singer via the social network everyone hated. This
year, I hated it extra.
# Chapter 2
I joined the e-book startup at the beginning of 2013, after a series
of ambiguous and casual interviews.
For the first time in my career, I had some expertise. The men asked
for my opinions--on the app's reading experience, on the quality of
the inventory, on how best to ingratiate ourselves with online
reading communities--and listened for the answers. Despite
misunderstanding the technical infrastructure and having little
insight into strategy, I felt useful. It was thrilling to watch the
moving parts of a business come together; to feel that I could
contribute.
Later, once I better understood the industry-wide interest in
promoting women in tech--if not in the ranks, then at least in
corporate marketing materials--I would allow myself to consider that
perhaps I was more important to the aesthetic than critical to the
business.
What I also did not understand at the time was that the founders had
all hoped I would make my own job, without deliberate instruction.
The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating
the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it
was institutionally unnecessary. This was an existential strategy for
the tech industry itself, and it did not come naturally to me.
"She's too interested in learning, not doing," the CEO typed once
into the company chat room. This was an accident... I had always
been interested in learning, and I had always been rewarded for it;
learning was what I did best. I wasn't used to having the sort of
professional license and latitude that the founders were given. I
lacked their confidence, their entitlement. I did not know about
startup maxims to experiment and "own" things. I had never heard the
common tech incantation "Ask forgiveness, not permission."
In an effort to self-educate, I read blog posts about the startup
mentality and did my best to imitate it.
After several long and heartfelt emails and another painful
one-on-one huddle in the conference room, it was clear that there was
no way I could stay. This was not the right moment in the company's
journey, they said, for someone like me to get up to speed. The
areas where I could add value would not be active for some time.
# Chapter 3
There weren't any jobs, my friends said, unless you wanted to work
for a tech company. It went without saying that none of them did.
When I traveled to San Francisco in the spring, to interview for a
customer-support position at a data analytics startup, I didn't
mention it to any of my ex-Bay Area friends. I dreaded how they
would react if they knew I was angling for a job in the tech
industry, that I had even a shred of interest in joining the people
on whom they blamed their displacement--the people who had ruined
their fun.
The interview had been arranged with the help of the e-book startup's
CEO, who advise that big data was a hot space.
I was not particularly excited about customer support, but it was an
entry-level job that required no programming knowledge. As a
sociology major with a background in literary fiction and three
months of experience in snack procurement, I assumed that I was not
in a position to be picky. The e-book startup's cofounders had been
adamant that customer support was a temporary state. If I hustled,
all three of them agreed, I would quickly find myself in a more
interesting, autonomous, impressive role.
[The company offered her the job.] The offer included medical and
dental coverage, a four-thousand-dollar relocation stipend, and a
starting salary of sixty-five thousand dollars a year. The manager
informed me that the salary was above market and nonnegotiable.
[A friend asked "What is that? Do you care about it? And customer
support--aren't you worried it'll be soul ruining?"]
I was worried about a lot of things... But I wasn't too worried
about my soul.
Out of self-protection, I stuck to the narrative that I was moving
across the country just to try something new.
It was easier, in any case, to fabricate a romantic narrative than
admit that I was ambitious--that I wanted my life to pick up
momentum, go faster.
# Chapter 4
The solutions manager assigned me an onboarding buddy, Noah, a
curly-haired twenty-six-year-old with a forearm tattoo in Sanskrit
and a wardrobe of workman's jackets and soft fleeces. Noah was warm
and loquacious, animated, handsome. He struck me as the kind of
person who would invite women over to get stoned and look at art
books and listen to Brian Eno, and then actually spend the night
doing that. I had gone to college with men like this: men who would
comfortably sit on the floor with their backs against the bed, men
who self-identified as feminists and would never make the first move.
I could immediately picture him making a seitan stir-fry, suggesting
a hike in the rain. Showing up in an emergency and thinking he knew
exactly what to do. Noah spoke in absolutes and in the language of
psychoanalysis, offering definitive narratives for everyone,
everything.
# Chapter 5
The city's passive-aggressive, progressive, permissive politics
tended to rankle transplants, but tech's self-appointed
representatives weren't for everyone, either. Every three months a
different engineer or aspiring entrepreneur, new to the city, would
post a screed on a blogging platform with no revenue model. He would
excoriate the poor for clinging to rent control and driving up condo
prices, or excoriate the tent cities by the freeway for being an
eyesore. He would suggest monetizing homeless people by turning them
into Wi-Fi hotspots. He would lambaste the weak local sports teams,
the abundance of bicyclists, the fog. "Like a woman who is
constantly PMSing," a twenty-three-year-old founder of a crowdfunding
platform wrote about the climate. The extension of casual misogyny
to weather was creative, but the digital ambassadors didn't seem to
like actual women, either: they whined that the women in San
Francisco were fives, not tens, and whined that there weren't enough
of them.
Homeless encampments sprouted in the shadows of luxury developments.
This concentration of public pain was new to me, unsettling. I had
never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and
affluent idealism. It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had
underestimated. As a New Yorker, I had thought I was prepared. I
thought I'd seen it all. I felt humbled and naïve--and guilty, all
the time.
# Chapter 6
As part of the onboarding process, the operations manager set me up
on lunch dates with coworkers from across the company.
The startup hosted a monthly salon for the data curious, a catered
happy hour with presentations from product managers and engineers,
sourced from our customer list...
The men roamed in clusters, like college freshmen during orientation
week. ... There was not a coursing undercurrent of peculiar sexual
energy, or any sexual energy at all; everything was straightforward,
up front. The attendees were clear about what they wanted, which was
for their companies to grow.
"I want you to eventually lead Support," the CEO aid, leaning in.
"We need more women in leadership roles." I basked in his attention.
... I didn't think to mention that if he wanted more women in
leadership roles, perhaps we should start by hiring more women. I
didn't note that even if we did hire more women, there were elements
of our office culture that women might find uncomfortable. Instead,
I told him that I would do whatever he needed.
# Chapter 7
Every Tuesday, at exactly noon, over a hundred synchronized sirens
wailed across San Francisco, a test of the city's emergency warning
system. The sirens also signaled, at the analytics startup, that it
was time for our weekly all-hands.
Down for the Cause: the phrase was in our job listings and our
internal communications. It meant putting the company first, and it
was the highest form of praise. The holy grail was being thanked by
the CEO in person--or, better yet, in the company chat room--for
being DFTC.
For years, the catchphrase had been "So easy, your mother could use
it," but this had grown uncouth and politically incorrect, to be used
only in meetings where women weren't present, of which there were
plenty.
One evening, over dinner, the CEO encouraged me to expand my scope:
learn how to code, start doing work outside of my job description.
"Make it so that they'll have no option but to promote you," he
advised. Who was "they," I wondered--wasn't "they" him? He told me
he would personally promote me to solutions architect if I could
build a networked, two-player game of checkers.
I was not excited to be in control of the machine. I did not achieve
flow. There was nothing I needed or desired from software. There
was nothing I wanted to hack or build. I didn't need to outsource
another part of my life to an app, and I never played checkers. The
part of my brain that took some pleasure in coding also thrived on
obsessive-compulsive behavior and perfectionism. It wasn't the part
of my brain that I wanted to nurture.
# Chapter 8
Besides, I had never lived alone before, and now had 275 square feet
to myself. It felt like total privacy. The door locked in four
places.
The neighborhood had incubated the sixties counterculture and nearly
fifty years later nobody seemed willing to give that identity up.
Visitors from all over the world arrived as if on a pilgrimage,
looking for something that may never have existed.
My single coworkers were all on multiple dating apps, and encouraged
me to follow suit. But I found myself newly cautious, leery of
giving away too much intimate data. ... I never knew with whom I
was sharing my information.
# Chapter 9
In midsummer, news broke that a National Security Agency contractor
had leaked classified information about the US government's enormous,
tentacled surveillance programs.
The part of the story that captured my attention was a minor detail,
practically a sidebar. It was revealed that lower-level employees at
the NSA, including contractors, had access to the same databases and
queries as their high-level superiors. Agents spied on their family
members and love interests, nemeses and friends. It was by all
accounts, a nightmare scenario. But it wasn't that hard to imagine.
At the analytics startup, we never once talked about the
whistleblower, not even during happy hour. ... We didn't think of
ourselves as participating in the surveillance economy. We weren't
thinking about our role in facilitating and normalizing the creation
of unregulated, privately held databases on human behavior. ...
Besides, if we didn't do it, someone else would.
The sole moral quandary in our space that we acknowledged outright was
the question of whether or not to sell data to advertisers. That was
something we did not do, and we were righteous about it.
* * *
The CEO and solutions manager agreed we needed more women on Support,
but they didn't hire any. Instead, we built out a small cadre of
overqualified millennial men fleeing law, finance, education, and
dorm-room entrepreneurship.
* * *
It didn't take long to see that in Silicon Valley, non-engineers were
pressed to prove their value.
* * *
One morning, a meeting was dropped mysteriously onto our calendars.
At the designated time, we shuffled into a conference room, shrugging.
On the other side of the table, the solutions manager paced back and
forth, but he was smiling. He asked us to write down the names of
the five smartest people we knew, and my coworkers dutifully obliged.
Smart in exactly what way, I wondered, capping and uncapping my pen.
I wrote five names down: a sculptor, a writer, a physicist, two
graduate students. I looked at the list and thought about how much I
missed them, how bad I'd been at returning phone calls and emails.
"Okay," the solutions manager said. "Now tell me, why don't they
work here?"
Why didn't my smartest friends work there? It was hard to confront,
but not because it was complicated.
My friends wouldn't have found the work fulfilling or meaningful.
They weren't interested in other businesses' business metrics. They
didn't care for tech and, for the most part, they weren't motivated
by money, not yet. Those who were motivated by money could make more
of it doing something else: finance, medicine, law, consulting. They
already did.
Startup culture was not for them. They would have taken one look at
the company website and balked.
# Chapter 11
It seemed like half of the new-school old-schoolers spent the bulk of
their spare time on overstuffed secondhand couches, drinking tea and
processing. Processing was a daily routine, a group activity.
People consulted one another on their romantic entanglements, their
financial problems, their hemorrhoids. Everyone was always checking
in.
I struggled to assimilate.
Processing as a hobby made me feel an affinity for the cool,
impersonal bullshit of business culture. Radical honesty often
looked to me like a collapse of the barrier between subjectivity and
objectivity. It could look like cruelty. But it also seemed to work.
I did not want to judge them. I admired their collectivity, which
seemed to me wholesome and intimate. The trust among friends was
familial, openhearted, optimistic. There was true community.
# Chapter 13
Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer
support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for
internalized misogyny. I liked men--I had a brother. I had a
boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my
boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing round
their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding,
collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering
them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a
position of ceaseless professionalized deference to the male ego.
From time to time, the women in the office would go out to a nearby
wine bar with fake fireplaces and plates of sweating charcuterie, and
try to drink it out. I enjoyed these outings, even if they bore the
metallic taste of duty--less a support network than a mutual
acknowledgment.
I stopped wearing dresses, to stanch a recruiter's stream of strange
and unsettling compliments about my legs, which he spoke about as if
I were a piece of furniture.
Sexism, misogyny, and objectification did not define the
workplace--but they were everywhere. Like wallpaper, like air.
The Account Management team brought on a man who spoke in inscrutable
jargon and maintained a robust fleet of social media accounts; he had
thousands of followers, and behaved as if he were an influencer. He
was constantly changing his job title on a web site where people
voluntarily posted their own résumés, giving himself promotions to
positions that did not exist.
The influencer brought a scooter into the office and rolled around
barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking: "value prop,
first-mover advantage, proactive technology, parallelization.
Leading-edge solutions. Holy grail."
One afternoon, he rolled up to my desk. "I love dating Jewish
women," he said. "You're so sensual."
I brought the comment up to the solutions manager during one of our
perambulating one-on-one check-ins. I wasn't trying to get anyone in
trouble, I said, as we walked past a sandwich shop effusing
artificial bread scent, and the comment was not in and of itself so
offensive--but I had to think about the influencer's sexual
proclivities in the middle of my workday, and I wanted not to do that.
The solutions manager seemed embarrassed. "I'm sorry that happened,"
he said, staring at the sidewalk. "But you know him. That's just
who he is."
# Chapter 14
[The author introduces the idea of the annual company ski trip in
Tahoe.]
I also resented that it seemed as if we had no choice: it was not
DFTC to skip out on the off-site. This made it feel like mandatory
vacation, mandatory fun.
The startup had booked a row of condominiums at a resort in South
Tahoe, up against the lake. The housing groups had been preassigned,
without employee consultation. There was one person I hoped not to
bunk with: several weeks prior, I had split a cab with one of the men
from the Solutions team, en route to our mutual neighborhood after a
late night spent drinking at work. During the ride, his hand had
slipped up the back of my shirt, and, when I shoved it away, down the
waistband of my pants. I kept the conversation going, pushing his
hands away, sliding toward the window.
# Chapter 15
"If the reports are accurate, the veil between ad tech and state
surveillance is very thin."
* * *
"The worst part," Parker said, "is that the technology is getting
worse every day. It's getting less secure, less autonomous, more
centralized, more surveilled. Every single tech company is pushing on
one of those axes, in the wrong direction."
# Chapter 16
The startup was moving into the enterprise. We were selling to major
corporations in and outside of the tech sector. We were selling to
the United States government. We were becoming accountable.
The company was growing.
As early employees, we were dangerous. We had experienced an early,
more autonomous, unsustainable iteration of the company. We had
known it before there were rules. We knew too much about how things
worked, and harbored nostalgia and affection for the way things were.
We didn't want to outgrow the company, but the company was
outgrowing us.
* * *
My meeting had no calendar invite, no warning. On a Friday
afternoon, as I was packing up to leave, the CEO summoned me into a
conference room.
"I thought you were an amazing worker at first," he said, palms on
the table, voice slow. "Working late every night, last out of the
office. But now I wonder if the work was just too hard for you to
begin with."
He wanted to know: Was I Down for the Cause? Because if I wasn't
Down for the Cause, then it was time. We could do this amicably.
I told him I was down--of course I was down.
If I didn't want to stay at the company, the CEO said, he would
personally help me find a new job. Either way, I would not be
leading the Support Engineering team. "I've decided you aren't
analytical," he said. "I don't think we have the same values. I
don't even know what your values are."
Despite my best efforts, I cried twice in the meeting, leaving in the
middle to grab tissues from the bathroom, dodging looks of concern
from the Engineering cluster.
# Chapter 17
As my annual review rolled around, I found myself on the fence about
whether or not to bring up the running list of casual hostilities
toward woman that added unsolicited texture to the workplace.
Over email, I told my mother about the colleague with the smartwatch
app that was just an animated GIF of a woman's breasts bouncing in
perpetuity, and the comments I'd fielded about my weight, my lips, my
clothing, my sex life. I told her about the list the influencer
kept, ranking the most bangable women in the office.
She emailed me back almost immediately: "Don't put complaints about
sexism in writing," she wrote. "Unless, of course, you have a
lawyer at the ready."
* * *
I was promoted from Support Engineering into something the industry
called Customer Success. I was a customer success manager, a CSM.
Our customers. My inbox and personal voice mail were full of demands
from entitled, stubborn unknown men. I thought of all the times over
the past year that I had been underestimated, condescended to,
dismissed.
* * *
Being a customer success manager was more interesting than being a
support engineer, but the title was so corny and oddly stilted in its
pseudo-sincerity that I could not bring myself to say it out loud.
This turned out to work to my advantage: when I changed my email
signature to read "technical account manager" instead, it actually
elicited a response from previously uncommunicative clients--always
engineers, always founders, and, still, always men.
I didn't know that customer success managers at other companies were
usually young women who somehow didn't look dowdy in floral prints
and never left the house with wet hair, whose socks always matched,
who didn't make too many jokes, who always knew the answers. ...
Women to whom saying no was impossible.
It was easy to say no to me. I was always picking lint off my own
chest, trying to skate by on good humor. When I met with customers,
I acted like I was cosplaying a 1980s business manager.
# Chapter 18
There was, of course, a red flag. That spring, the startup had been
implicated in a highly publicized gender discrimination scandal. The
first woman on the engineering team--a developer and designer, a
woman of color, and an advocate for diversity in tech--had posted a
series of grievances to the microblogging platform. The startup, she
claimed, was a boys' club, a sexist institution, down to the core:
colleagues condescended to her, reverted and erased her code, and
created a hostile work environment. She described a company culture
where women were disrespected and intimidated.
The developer's posts went viral: The story wound its way up into the
national media. The startup conducted an investigation. An
implicated founder stepped down, and another moved to France.
All of this made me leery, but I also wondered, privately, if there
might be some benefit to joining an organization immediately after
this sort of blowup.
* * *
[The author interviewed and then received an offer.]
"We're expecting big things from you, ourselves, and for the
company," read the offer letter, with condescension I found only
vaguely objectionable. "You should be justifiably proud." I was,
and I wasn't. Mostly, I was burned out.
What I wanted in a workplace was simple. I wanted to trust my
manager. To receive fair and equal compensation. To not feel
weirdly bullied by a twenty-five-year-old. To put some faith in a
system--any system would do--for accountability. To take it all much
less personally, and not to get too close.
# Chapter 21
The engineers all read a heavily moderated message board, a news
aggregator and discussion site run by the seed accelerator in
Mountain View. The message board was frequented by entrepreneurs,
tech workers, computer science majors, libertarians, and the people
who lived to fight with them. People whose default conversational
mode was debate. Mostly men. Men on both sides of the seawall; men
all the way down.
It wasn't for me, but I read it anyway. It struck me as the raw male
id of the industry, a Greek chorus of the perpetually online.
* * *
I flew to Phoenix for an annual conference of women in computing.
Everyone I knew in tech had a story, first or secondhand. That week,
I heard new ones: the woman who had been offered an engineering job,
only to see the offer revoked when she tried to negotiate a higher
salary; the woman who had been told, to her face, that she was not a
culture fit. The woman demoted after maternity leave. The woman who
had been raped by a "10X" engineer, then pushed out of the company
after reporting to HR. The woman who had been slipped GHB by a
friend of her CEO. We had all been told, at some point or another,
that diversity initiatives were discriminatory against white men;
that there were more men in engineering because men were innately
more talented. Women kept personal incident logs. They kept
spreadsheets. They kept tabs. Some were beginning to step forward
and speak about their experiences openly. It felt like the start of
a sea of change.
Not everyone was excited by the public conversation.
During the conference's keynote speech, the CEO of a highly litigious
Seattle-based software conglomerate encouraged women to refrain from
asking for raises. "It's not really about asking for the raise, but
knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right
raises as you go along," he said. "That might be one of the
additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don't ask for
raises have." Better, he offered, to trust karma.
* * *
To my knowledge, our company had just two black employees.
# Chapter 27
Friends hosted a rave in the Sacramento Delta, billed as a radical
self-reliance event. "The land is dry and needs your sweat," read
the invitation. "We are itching to fill the farm with joyful, hungry
bodies." ... To prepare, I packed a pair of black harem pants, a
small vaporizer, a novel, and The Artist's Way. "I don't think
people read at raves," Ian said, eyeing my tote bag, but he let it go.
In the late afternoon, a man and woman emerged from the woods,
dressed in white, loose linen. They announced that there would be a
ritual. They were regal in face paint, pink from the sun. Everyone
lined up, passing a joint from front to back, and marched down to the
creek, where they disrobed. Our leaders, still partly clothed, waded
into the water and took turns dipping everyone backward, like a
baptism. The linen floated to the surface, like scum. No way, I
whispered to Ian. Too goyish. I hung back and kept my suit on,
joining once the ritual was over.
The naked bodies bobbed downstream. They clambered up to the edge of
the creek and communed with the livestock on the other side, and lay
out to dry in the drooping sun. Cans of beer floated in the creek.
I felt a familiar loneliness, participating in something bigger than
myself and still feeling apart from it.
Sometimes it felt as if everyone had watched a highlight reel of
people enacting freedom in the sixties and seventies--casual nudism,
gleeful promiscuity, communal living, communal eating, communal
bathing. There had been some talk of buying group land up near
Mendocino. There had been some talk of shared childcare, even though
no one had children. It struck me as a performance from an imperfect
past, a reenactment. The pursuit of liberation, some pure joy.
I wondered if all this was perhaps just a form of resistance.
Technology was gnawing into relationships, community, identity, the
commons. Maybe nostalgia was just an instinctual response to the
sense that materiality was disappearing from the world. I wanted to
find my own way to hedge against it, my own form of collective.
# Chapter 28
At work, corners of the open-source platform were growing
increasingly vicious and bizarre.
Still, I had long since stopped doing public work under my own name.
For all external correspondence, I used male pseudonyms. Thankfully,
we never had to use the phone. I did this in part because the work
could be sensitive, with the potential to upset people whose digital
currency was cruelty; I wasn't the only person on the team using a
fake name. But using male pseudonyms wasn't just useful for
defusing or de-escalating tense exchanges. It was useful for even
the most harmless support requests. I was most effective when I
removed myself. Men, I saw, simply responded differently to men. My
male pseudonyms had more authority than I had.
* * *
In the spring, a far-right publication ran a blog post about the VP
of Social Impact, zeroing in on her critique of diversity-in-tech
initiatives that tended to disproportionately benefit white women.
The post ran with a collage of octopus-cats, under the headline
ANTI-WHITE AGENDA REVEALED.
The article sparked a furor in the comments section, accumulating
hundreds of responses. The publication's readers made conspiratorial
statements about Marxism and Hollywood, liberal victimhood, reverse
racism, and the globalist agenda. They published panicked
micro-essays about the Federalist Papers and North Venezuela, and the
cultural extermination of the West. It was a cacophony of dog
whistles.
The comments section burst. Menacing vitriol about my coworkers
spread across social media. The Sales line rang with rabid callers.
The publication seemed to have mobilized a faction that was hell-bent
on amplifying far-right ideas under the guise of political debate,
using any available channel. By the end of the day, the VP, the CEO,
and a handful of outspoken employees had become targets of a vicious
internet harassment campaign. It was not the first time this had
happened to coworkers--it was, to my knowledge, already the third
instance this year.
The campaign was a barrage: it persisted for days. Some of the
threats were specific enough that the company hired security escorts.
HQ had an uneasy air. A threatening note was found taped to the door
of the employee entrance.
I mentioned to a coworker how striking it was that all internet
harassment now seemed to follow a playbook: the methods of the
far-right commentariat were remarkably similar to what we had seen,
eighteen months prior, from the troll bloc targeting women in gaming.
It was like an entire generation had developed its political identity
online, using the style and tone of internet forums.
Is this just how things are now? I asked. It was bizarre to me that
two different groups would have the same rhetorical and tactical
strategies.
My coworker was a connoisseur of online forums and bulletin boards.
He looked at me askance. "Oh, my sweet summer child," he said.
"They are absolutely the same people."
# Chapter 29
San Francisco had tipped into a full-blown housing crisis. Whenever
the media reported that a new tech company had filed an S-1 with the
SEC, people started comparing notes on tenants' rights. Buy a house
before the next IPO, my coworkers joked. It wasn't a joke because it
was funny; it was a joke because the overnight-wealthy were bidding
60 percent over asking on million-dollar starter homes, and paying in
cash.
* * *
City-building was a natural interest for well-capitalized people
whose employees could hardly afford to live in the Bay Area and whose
corporate patrons and VC hypebeasts instilled the belief that startup
founders could not just change the world, but should be the ones to
save it. It was a testing ground for the efficacy of a
first-principles approach to living.
First-principles thinking: Aristotelian physics, but for the
management-science set. Technologists broke down infrastructure and
institutions, examined the parts, and redesigned systems their way.
College dropouts re-architected the university, skinning it down to
online trade schools. Venture capitalists unbundled the subprime
mortgage crisis, funding startups offering home loans. Multiple
founders raised money to build communal living spaces in
neighborhoods where people were getting evicted for living in
communal living spaces.
What I didn't realize was that technologists; excitement about
urbanism wasn't just an enthusiasm for cities, or for building
large-scale systems, though these interests were sincere. It was an
introductory exercise, a sandbox, a gateway: phase one of settling
into newfound political power.
# Chapter 30
The venture capitalists were discussing a universal basic income, and
I couldn't look away. They were concerned about the unlocked
economic potential of the urban poor. ... They wanted to see
automation and artificial intelligence jump-start a renaissance: the
machines would do the work so the rest of us, rendered useless, could
focus on our art.
I'd believe in an AI renaissance as soon as venture capitalists
started enrolling in pottery classes; as soon as they were automated
out of a job.
* * *
The intellectual culture of Silicon Valley was internet culture:
thought-leadership, thought experiments. Message-board
intellectualism.
But rationalism could also be a mode of historical disengagement that
ignored or absolved massive power imbalances. A popular rationality
podcast covered topics such as free will and moral responsibility;
cognitive bias; the ethics of vote trading. When the podcast did an
episode with an evolutionary psychologist who identified as a
transhumanist, bivalvegan classical liberal, she and the host
discussed designer babies optimized for attractiveness without once
bringing up race or the history of eugenics. Arguing fervently about
a world that was not actually the world struck me as vaguely immoral.
At best, it was suspiciously flattering to power. I found the
subculture astonishing, not least because it flourished among grown
adults.
* * *
The rationalist swept her hair behind one ear. Contrarianism was
underrated, she said. The intellectual contributions were, on net,
positive. It was difficult to judge, in the present moment, which
ideas would hold water; thus, better to err n the side of more
debate, rather than less. "As an example, think of the
abolitionists," she said. I asked what the abolitionists had to do
with libertarian contrarianism. "Well," she said, "sometimes
minority opinions lead to positive and widespread adoption, and are
good."
As a neutral statement, this was hard to disagree with. Some
minority opinions did lead to positive change. I wanted to give her
the benefit of the doubt. But we weren't talking about a neutral
statement. We were talking about history.
I... ventured that the abolition of slavery was perhaps not a
minority position. Slaves themselves were surely abolitionists, I
said. Just because no one was polling them didn't mean they did not
exist. I was trying to be lighthearted. I was trying to be kind. I
was trying not to embarrass both of us, though that ship might
already have sailed.
The rationalist turned to look wistfully at the other partygoers, now
gathered in the living room and happily instructing a
virtual-assistant speaker to play workout music. She sighed.
"Okay," she said. "But, for the sake of argument, what if we limit
our sample to white people?"
# Chapter 33
When it started to look like perhaps we were wrong--perhaps the
United States presidency might actually go to a realestate developer
who had once played the part of a successful businessman on reality
television--everyone came up with a last-ditch, Hail Mary pass at
civic participation.
In the grand tradition of affluent white American living in coastal
cities in times of political crisis and social upheaval, I had turned
inward.
author: Wiener, Anna, 1987-
TEXT detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Uncanny_Valley_(memoir)
LOC: HC107.C2 H5335
tags: biography,book,non-fiction
title: Uncanny Valley
# Tags
DIR biography
DIR book
DIR non-fiction